New Mexico may have a little more to grow because the industry had to fight the state and US on Federal leases. Besides that, you’re dead on, the industry has made massive investments in shale leases, water rights and handling, pipelines and facilities, drilling rigs and fracking supply system to get and move the oil/gas. And the plan now is drill / frack as needed to keep full.
Eventually other parts of the world will figure it out.
Enterprise Product => smart investor buys a lot of dumb steel => tax free dividends. I should have bought more than I did.
I bought on the IPO in ‘98. The units initially traded poorly, so I called to speak with EPD’s investor relations.
When no one answered, my call got kicked up to the CFO, and when HE didn’t answer I was put through to the chairman and CEO, Dan Duncan! I still remember what he said. “We can’t predict how Wall Street values us, but we’ve met or exceeded every internal financial and operating objective that we’d set.” That call encouraged me to double my position.
As an aside, I’ll mention that Duncan knew a lot about tax efficiency: he chose to die in the year 2010, when the estate tax had lapsed. His family inherited over $20 billion tax-free!